HDCP seperate box ?  

I've had one of these for a while.

Actually they were available in the US before the Germans got hold of them.

I got mine from digitalconnection.com

How well does it work? It works. 'Bout all there is to it.

Well, if I'm going real "picky" with the box, it does has some dread "EDID" issue with some STB.

regards,

Li On

I'm pretty sure you can turn EDID off on it.

Call it globalisation.

It's definitely not "cracked", it was simply "bypassed". The entire point of the HDMI agreements was to prevent this from happening.

The solution in this case is exactly the same as SDI (simply don't sign the agreement and if you can get the chips and keys, you're all set).

The only catch is that if the HDMI/HDCP groups find out about this, they will likely try to charge that the DMCA (Millenium act) is being violated here. Luckily for Spatz, the company is not a US company...

The DMCA can't touch you if you're not in the USA or Australia.

can someone send me a link to the item on digitalconnection or any other us website to purchase from?

thanks

Pablo

Time for a group purchase! ;)

I am surprised that AVS continues to allow these threads. Unfortunately, it seems too late now. Thanks to Spatz for using such a subtle description on his site and all those who could not resist posting about this, revocation now seems inevitable. Anyone purchasing one of these boxes with the hope that they will still work with HD-DVD is a fool.

May be only fools will go for BD/HD-DVD ... I don't want my wife to know from the Internet bills that I was (somehow) watching some stupid BD/HD-DVD while messing with my mistress down in Bahamas ...

A really bad joke ... :p

This reminds me of the DirecTV debacle. They subpoenaed the customer lists of sellers of smartcard reader/writer and sued everyone on the list. Although a large portion of the customers were using the device to pirate DirecTV, some were not. They were caught in the dragnet and had to pay several thousand dollars to settle.

If you were to buy it, make sure you pay cash and don't leave your name :) Regarding revocation, you can always put a DVI Detective before the input to isolate the DDC lines from the source just in case.

EDIT: I wasn't quite awake when I posted the DVI Detective part. It's not going to work against the revocation list. Someone in the industry will buy the offending device, read the keys off of it, and figure out the origin of the chips. Once they know which batch they are from, they can put the list on HD-DVD/BR disks (like movies) and tell the player not to talk to them. Since HDCP requires a negotiation, DVI Detective won't work to block the revocation list.

I don't work on anything with HDCP (I am an engineer on a small medical product), but just for the sake of discussion let's say that I was hired to work on the first HD-DVD player that has not been released yet and that my job was to make sure that this specific device wouldn't work with that HD-DVD player. Do you guys believe that I (or someone else) couldn't find a way to keep it from working? I'm not out to help these guys, so I won't give details here, but I'm pretty confident I could keep it from working with that as yet unreleased player. Some will probably say that I couldn't if it uses the same keys as some consumer displays since I would have to disable all of them with key revocation, but I don't think that would stop me. I think worst case is most likely that I would have to disable one type of consumer display that uses the same HDCP keys and allow the rest to work.

I understand why people think that once players are released some people will find ways around the copy protection, but I don't understand why people would assume that the guys building these players that haven't been released are so brain-dead that they can't figure out a way to keep these devices that people already own from working. Especially when there are some very bright minds working on this stuff. There are bright minds on both sides and that is why people are able to disable something after the other side has finalized and released something (which hasn't happened yet with HD-DVD and BluRay players). And the game hasn't really started at this point since there isn't much incentive for Hollywood to disable output to these devices given that all the source devices I know of with HDCP also have component outputs and upconverted material isn't important to protect any more than the native source. If HD-DVD and BluRay are limited to 480p analog output then that is the point at which keeping these HDCP breaking devices from working will matter to Hollywood.

I think people buying this device so they can use it for HD-DVD and BluRay should know that we aren't in the 4th quarter with the game over, we are in the 1st quarter and somebody found a way to get a lead over HDCP. It will not surprise me at all if this device ends up not working with HD-DVD and/or BluRay and people have to buy another (a different one) or get some other "solution".

--Darin

Darin is right. The beauty of the revocation list is that it's not a hardcoded list; it can be continuously updated. When you get that new-release BR/HD-DVD from Netflix, it can contain an updated revocation list. While you're sleeping, your HDTivo or Comcast tuner can be downloading a new revocation list. And theoretically your Comcast tuner can pass the list onto your HD-DVD player (if they can communicate with each other, that is).

To add to what Darin said, the argument that it’s unlikely that a high volume consumer product, like a plasma display, will be revoked along with the black boxes, is faulty. I think that the attitude will be that an HDCP licensee that allowed chips to wind up on the black market deserves all the consumer complaints they will get when their display no longer works with HDCP sources.

What if the manufacturer didn't "allow" it to happen? What if some pirate buys their plasma and strips the chip out? Who do the plasma owners complain to then?

Actually the "players" on the other team aren't even out on the field yet, so it is still the pre-game show. ;)

The same place you complain to when you don’t win the lottery. Seriously, this is obviously not how this happened.

Your analogy doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, unless you are equating the purchase of an HDTV and its ability to actually play supported HD content with gambling?

Not in this case, but what's stopping it from happening?

Sigh... Why is is that people insist on ratcheting up this war by trying to crack everything that comes out? Every time you crack the current scheme, you just insure that the next one will be worse. It's not going to stop because there is just a stupid (and growing stupider) amount of theft of copyrighted material going on out there, and no one with a brain in their head would sit back and let themselves get ripped off like that. So they are going to continue creating more and stricter CP mechanisms if people keep breaking the current one. So the people doing these cracks are no friend of the honest consumer.

You don’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. I meant someone’s deity or its equivalent. Life is not always fair, is it? I suppose you can also complain to the pirate and try to get some reimbursement. (I refer you to the first sentence.)

The manufacturers certainly have a lot of incentive to make removal of functioning chips very difficult, otherwise they risk revocation and a lot of customer complaints.

My only point is about the wisdom of discussing these things on a public forum and the resultant greatly increased risk of revocation. If I was not completely convinced that the revocation process is already in the works, I would have stayed quiet. It’s already much too late and many of the potential purchasers of these boxes don’t seem to know the risk.

Who or what convinced you?

Not on this topic, it seems. I don't really think that, "Oh well, you're screwed. Life isn't fair. Just buy a new TV/projector, which may also have its key revoked a week later" is an acceptable answer.

Here's the unavoidable fact: Pirates are crafty and devious. They will eventually find a way to get around HDCP. Revoking a key to a large number of legitimately purchased products may slow them down, but they'll just find a way to hack another key, which will cause the revocation of another large group of products. This will just continue to go on in circles until eventually all keys are revoked and the whole format dies because no one anywhere is able to play it.

I do agree that reasonable measures must be taken to curtail piracy, but punishing legitimate customers is just not reasonable.

Sadly, I agree.

I would agree, if that were the answer being given. It's not. We're talking about revoking the key for a device which was compromised from the get-go. This wasn't a product that someone "hacked" to give it HDCP stripping capability; this was a product that was released with that capability. It's also a relatively low-volume product. I would not be surprised if the powers that be feel free to revoke the key for this product, then. It's a low-hanging fruit.

Now if someone successfully modded, say, a Faroudja standalone scaler to add HDCP stripping capability, it would be a far different story. In that case, before the key could be revoked, the HDCP folks would probably have to prove that the Faroudja designers were negligent in their attempt to provide reasonable protection against hacks. Certainly, Faroudja would fight back. Thus it would be unlikely that the key would ever be revoked; and if it were, Faroudja would be responsible to its legitimate customers to compensate them. Only because HDCP is fundamentally flawed from a technical standpoint. I frankly am far less positive about the true capabilities of so-called hackers. CSS wasn't broken by brute force or cleverness so much as the negligence of a software provider who left their keys in the clear. It's kind of like commending a bank robber for his craftiness when the truth is the alarm "off" switch was exposed on the side of the bank.

A sligntly more impressive feat was the recent defeat of DVD-A's copy protection, but again, that was accomplished by hacking a software implementation. Needless to say, there's a hole that will be closed in future A/V formats. The only hack that truly impressed me, though, was the recovery of Xbox encryption keys by successfully eavesdropping on the HyperTransport bus. That one took some serious skill and $$$ to accomplish though; and again, that's a hole that will now be closed in the future. (Not to mention that it was peformed in an academic setting and the said keys will never be released by the researchers.)

On the general question, I have no problem whatsoever with copy protection in theory. Obviously I have a problem when it unduly hinders the legitimate use of a product. But frankly, I think that happens far less often than the naysayers would have us believe. More importantly, the definition of "unduly hinders" is determined by the marketplace. If the market accepts a system laden with copy protection, then that's the way it is, even if a few fringe users like you and I whine about it.

I do think that laws like the DMCA are unfair and unnecessary and ought to be repealed. I think that to have hackers at least try to defeat copy protections spurs innovation on that front to make them stronger, but it also serves as an additional disincentive against making them too restrictive, too.

Just a few points, the device in question was not hacked, it was manufactured by a reputable company that screwed up a limited run and was given permission to sell them as is with the HDCP striped rather than destroy them, that is what I was told.

Lon

I don’t have any specific information about this, but everything I know about how these situations develop points to it. This is no longer a secret and is well known. There have also been hints from people in a position to actually know that there will be a response.

Yes, but if the story that the key inside this unit is one shared with popular plasma TVs is true (and I honestly have no way of validating this), revoking the key for this device punishes a lot of TV buyers who were promised HDTV capability when they purchased their sets.